Employee Blogging and
Fundamental Freedoms

In "Employee
blogging a growing source of concern," Lisa Tanner does a nice job of putting
together a lot of nonsense into a piece that seems to make sense. Had she given
her subject more thought, however, she would have written a different
article.

True, companies do
have a need to keep their trade secrets confidential. However, the two major
segments of the American economy are the retail and services sectors, and no
company in either of these sectors can legitimately claim to have trade secrets.
So if these companies are concerned about their employees' blogging, shouldn't
someone ask, What are they truing to hide?

Manufacturing
companies can have legitimate trade secretes, of course, but not all do, and
most of the employees of these firms are not in positions in which trade secrets
are revealed. So any fear these companies have is not increased by blogging.
Employees revealed trade secrets long before the internet came into existence,
and it makes no difference whether the revealing employee is a blogger or not. A
more genuine fear falls to companies that have offshored their manufacturing.
Foreigners are far more likely to reveal those secrets than domestic employees
are.

And there's a danger
in restricting the free speech rights of employees. Any astute, prospective
client can rightly wonder why such policies exist, what the companies are trying
to hide, and how what they are hiding could affect the prospective client should
he decide to do business with them. Remember that given the epidemic of
disclosures of not just unseemly but even fraudulent behavior within a good
number of major companies that had to then impeccable reputations, judicious
suspicion would seem to be in order. After all, the companies that did business
with Enron and MCI did not escape scott free.

The statement made
by W. Stephen Cockerham is revealing, however: "Companies are concerned about
the disclosure of. . . things that might
prove embarrassing to executives,customer (sic) or workers." This is a strange sentence. It doesnt say
that companies are concerned with things that would prove embarrassing, it says
that they are concerned with things that even might be embarrassing. Now
that covers a lot of stuff. What possible justification could anyone have for
wanting to restrict employee behavior to that extent?

I suggest that if
companies want to protect their reputations, the only fail-safe way of doing so
is to deal with people--employees, clients, and vendors--honestly and fairly,
and such behavior would never require one to place restrictions on the
activities of employees, be they bloggers or not.

But this tendency to
restriction has a more important and profound consequence, and the tendency is
growing.

The Constitution
prohibits the Congress from passing any law that restricts the rights of
religion, speech, the press, and of assembly. But what good does it do to have
such restrictions written into the Constitution if the nation's companies can
restrict these rights? The protected right is lost regardless of the
Constitution's guarantees. Does that make any sense?

Americans like to
call this nation the land of the free, but over the last several decades, more
and more activities have beenrepressed, and each such act of repression eliminates a freedom
previously possessed. If our employers can keep us from speaking freely, what
else can they forbid us from doing? You have probably heard of the company in
Ohio, I think, that required its employees to stop smoking even when not on the
job. Some have defended this company. But if what this company is doing is okay,
why can't K-Mart prohibit its employees from shopping at Wal-Mart? Why can't an
employer prohibit its employees from attending a certain church, from
associating with certain groups of people, or even from reading a certain
newspaper? How would the publishers of the DBJ react to a company's forbidding
its employees from reading it?

Oh, you say these
things wont happen. Wanna bet?

These subtle
repressions are subverting the Constitution, for it really doesn't matter where
the repression originates. If aConstitutional rightis
suppressed, not by a Congressional act, but by some other societal entity, it is
nevertheless suppressed. The freedom is gone. The Constitutional guarantee alone
cannot protect it. The allowance of such activities renders the Constitution
meaningless, and America becomes not the land of the free but the realm of the
repressed. Wouldn't it be better for businesses to be embarrassed?

Americans
need to open their eyes and ears, and a good journalist can help us do that. But
that kind of journalism requires more than mere reporting; a bit of thought is
also needed. (Dallas Business Journal 6/25/2005)